Tag: old media

• Operation Tech Revival, Part 1

  

  Part 1: A little history, a soupçon of memories

  I had planned this week to post something very different, but in light of the way my week has panned out, I’m feeling all of the following much more keenly, particularly in the wake of some of my rants about social media and platforms and such like.
   
  My primary computer, for nearly ten years, was a 2014 Mac with Retina display. It was a beautiful beast, and served me very well, particularly through lockdowns when there were some issues getting an external monitor for my work laptop. Come early 2023, though, it was showing signs of wear and tear. I didn’t really want to fork out for a new machine when I had a perfectly good laptop from work, so I let it go out to pasture (the Apple Store).
   
  After some time off work last year, though, I wanted to put some effort into separating personal files from my work stuff. Up until this point, I had used a cloud service for everything, without a backup (shock horror). I do realise that somehow physically separating out machines and hard drives for work and non-work is fairly redundant in this age of clouds, but doing the actual labour of downloading from the cloud service, then separating out folders onto hard drives, machines, then backing everything up appropriately, was not a little therapeutic.
   
  Having carved out the workspace on the newer Macbook, I was left wondering what to do for a personal machine. There is always, obviously, the desire to rush out and drop a great deal of money on the latest model, but for various reasons, this is not currently a possibility for me. Aside from that, I’m surrounded by old tech, left in cupboards, not yet eBayed or traded in or taken away for recycling. I am aware and conscious enough of the horrific impact of e-waste, and with my recent interests in a smaller, more intimate, cosy, sustainable internet, I thought that maybe this would be a chance to put my money where my mouth is. If you can’t be with the sleek new tech you love, honey, love the slightly chunkier, dustier tech you’re with.
   
  Plus, I’ve always loved the idea of tinkering with tech, even if I’ve never actually done anything like this properly. My plans aren’t unachievable nor overly ambitious; I have two computers, broadly defined, that I hope to revive and use in tandem as a kind of compound personal machine. The first of these is a Raspberry Pi 3B+, the second a mid-late 2011 model Macbook Pro: the last Macbook I owned that wasn’t a work device.
   
  Come along with me, won’t you, on this journey of learning and self-discovery? Coming tomorrow (or at least in the coming days)… Part 2: Mmm, Pi.

• More lockdown ramblings

  

  Today is Tuesday. We’ve not had internet since Friday morning. Five long days.

  It’s a little thing. An inconsequential thing. Pretty rough for work, but generally not a huge loss: I can do research offline, tethering my iPhone when I need to, I’ve rescheduled meetings.

  I became reacquainted with boredom, with that lack of control over how you spend your time. But I also became a little concerned about how reliant I am on the internet for entertainment, for distraction.

  It’s an old conversation now, rife with misinformation and half-baked platitudes. But there is a loss of the moment when you’re swept along by the stream.

  We watched a bluray on Saturday night; a movie I grabbed from the bargain bin at JB a few years back. I have a whole bunch of such purchases, still in their plastic wrap and gathering dust on the bookcase.

  I read 550 pages of a book on Sunday: I’ve not done that since I was a teenager. I wouldn’t have done this if the old modem was ticking along. With hindsight, it was kind of wonderful: I did it because there was not much else I felt like doing, and I was bored.

  I got some Lego for my birthday; another thing I’ve not touched since even before my teenage years. It was perfect: just follow the instructions, put it together. The perfect occupation for a tired and overwhelmed mind.

  I’m not 100% sure what I’m getting at here. I’m certainly not singing the praises of the offline experience: Jesus H connect that broadband to my veins I need it, particularly during lockdown. I guess I’m more or less saying that rifling through the bookcase, the DVD collection, these were kind of nice things to do at a weird time.

  There is no old media or new media, as Simone Natale writes; rather there are cycles of use, dynamic shifts and re-organisations of our perception of and attitude towards different artefacts, platforms, systems.

  Nothing forces you to reevaluate your relationship to what surrounds you than being forced to live in it with no escape for months. And having looked closer, there are some hidden gems, new experiences to be had. (And then, doubtless, one hell of a spring clean once this damnėd lockdown ends.)